


what could have been

by bag_of_bones (Thoroughly_Misguided)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Fix-It, Gen, I found this in my drafts from 2018, Season 8 sucked every ounce of motivation from me, Time Travel, and it'll probably never be finished cri
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:15:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26283283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thoroughly_Misguided/pseuds/bag_of_bones
Summary: What could have been, what never will be.
Kudos: 1





	what could have been

**Author's Note:**

> Seven years of war doesn’t exactly do well for recall.
> 
> (If Keith was anything like any other person reminiscing about the past, he’d remember jack squat about the important shit, and every minute detail of everything else.)

_"When the night has come  
And the land is dark  
And the moon is the only light we’ll see  
No I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid  
Just as long as you stand, stand by me—"_

Keith slowly came back to consciousness to find himself slumped over a table, the crackled voice of King crooning softly close by. The tips of his fingers were going cold, his legs were going numb. His face was resting a couple inches away from a bomb.

As his limbs seized in alarm, Keith jerked his head away fast enough to give himself whiplash, hands braced on the rough wood (and that was something else to ponder over later— he didn’t think the Castle even had wooden furniture) of the table. He swore to whatever deity out there, if this was Pidge’s idea of a joke—

“Wha—shit!”

Unfortunately for him, the sudden jolt backwards overbalanced him, and both he and the stool he was sitting on toppled over with little fanfare. The back of Keith’s head hit the ground with a harsh thwack, and he only had a moment to wonder at the wooden rafters above him before his vision went fuzzy at the edges, and Keith blacked out.

_Again._

\----

The next time Keith woke, it was to the insistent buzz of radio static in his ear.

Carefully this time— never could it be said that Keith didn’t learn from (painful) experience— he rolled into his side, arm flopping over onto sand covered concrete. Rising to a sitting position, Keith tentatively brought his hand up to prod at the tender spot on the back of his head, sighing in relief when he didn’t encounter anything wet. Good, no blood.

It was one less thing to deal with in this foreign environment.

Casting a wary eye around, he took in the small room filled with dated equipment (quiznak, he wasn’t techy in the slightest, but seriously, this stuff was ancient), the dusty, sad-looking loveseat squished under a window, and wondered what kind of poor sodding kidnapper lived in this dump.

Because he had to have been kidnapped, surely. The last he checked, they’d just finished negotiations with the royal family down on the planet Quinsnaw. He remembered finishing the discussion, attending the feast, walking back to the lions…

And then nothing.

Disturbed, Keith rose to his feet, and went to shut off the radio before its static could clutter his head any more than it already had. The sudden cutoff of noise left him with an eerie quiet inside the room that was reflected with the lack of activity outside. Keith went to go test the rickety door, sure that he’d be able to open it with force if he needed to, only to be surprised when it swung open with ease.

The world only seemed marginally more sandy than the room he was standing in, great clouds of dust kicked off the ground with every gust of wind that blew. Small shrubs dotted the landscape—he was in a desert then?

Stepping outside, Keith turned to face the structure he’d been kept in. It was small, startlingly so. Wooden walls and glass panels and not much else kept the elements out; one strong wind looked as if it could knock the whole thing down. It barely classified as a house. Nobody would jump to call it that, anyway. If anything, it was more of a…

Of a shack. Shit.

He knew where he was.

Cursing quietly, Keith rushed back inside, ignoring the couch and the radio and the bomb, and instead focused on the myriad of papers pinned to one of the walls of the shack, confirming with shaking body what his mind refused to believe.

He was in a shack. His shack.

Keith was standing in front of a cork board that a conspiracy theorist would be proud of, papers and photos scattered haphazardly across the walls, the table, the floor, standing in a rickety shack some thirty minutes away from the Garrison. He was without his bayard, without his armor.

Without his team.

\----

The early morning air was bitterly cold. Sitting hunched over his mug of cheap diner coffee in an effort to steal its warmth, Keith poured over the daily newspaper that the sleepy-eyed waitress had lent him with a plate of eggs at his wrist and a red marker twirling between his fingers. After the initial shock and ensuing panic, he’d taken a deep breath, gathered what wits he still had, and set about information gathering.

...He’d found out that, as dictated per Kogane luck, it was all bad news.

Whatever had happened back on Quinsnaw, whatever link it was that he was missing, it was the key piece in solving the mystery of what had sent him back to Earth. Keith ran a finger over the printed date on the crinkled paper, wondering if there was a chance that he’d just been drugged and that this whole endeavor was a hallucination of unparalleled proportions.

**Author's Note:**

> I tried polishing it off before sending it out, but haaaa... I underestimated how thoroughly the drive to write for Voltron has left me. Why did I even post this, if it was never going to be finished? Who knows. Maybe it's in hope that I'll pick it up again one day. Or maybe it's in hope that these 800 some words inspires someone to write their own, better version.
> 
> Either way, I wasn't satisfied until it was out there! So here it is.


End file.
